Obama’s ‘Change From the Outside’ Means Community Organizing

President Obama recently lamented: “You can’t change Washington from the inside. You can only change it from the outside.” I think this statement reveals more about Obama and his plans for a second term than meets the eye.

Elaborating, Obama said, “I got elected and … big accomplishments like health care got done … because we mobilized the American people to speak out.”

Rubbish. Obamacare was not some outside, grass-roots-driven legislative achievement. Obama could never persuade Americans to support his bill or lobby Congress to pass it. He cobbled together his majority in the most inside of insider venues — the bowels of Congress, in secret rooms, where he twisted arms, made false promises and offered bribes to persuade congressmen to defy their constituents’ wishes. He didn’t persuade congressmen through reasoned arguments.

His entire adult life, from what we can best determine, Obama has always been animated by some big cause. He revels in activism and has leveraged his leadership roles in these causes to propel himself into ever-greater positions of influence, from editor of the Harvard Law Review to the Illinois Senate to the United States Senate to the presidency.

There seems to be little evidence that, once he arrived at any of these positions, he did much — other than what he had to do — to position himself to graduate to the next level. He wrote little as law review editor and sponsored few bills as a legislator. His focus was always on upward political mobility.

Obama’s stock in trade has always been rabble-rousing, community organizing and campaigning. When it comes to actual governing, he’s a fish out of water — an alien visitor without a spaceship. It’s obvious that he simply does not enjoy actually doing the jobs he is elected to do.

Don’t get me wrong. Obama has not solely been concerned with acquiring power for the sake of satisfying his narcissistic appetite for attention, fame and power. As a leftist radical, he happens to fervently believe in the causes he has pursued.

But when he arrived at the highest office in the land, he still lacked skills at basic governance and disliked the mundane parts of the job, which he probably considered beneath his self-perceived calling to revolutionize America. So even as president, he’s remained the persistent community organizer and the perpetual campaigner for this or that initiative, such as the stimulus and Obamacare, and then for his re-election effort.

Despite his passion for these big-ticket “reforms,” he didn’t want to be bothered with the details of these bills. His function was to sell the big idea and let others fill in the blanks. Beyond the broad strokes and helping his cronies, he probably had little knowledge of the specific provisions in his stimulus bill. And we mustn’t forget that he never formulated his own health care bill and was prepared to adopt whichever one made it through Congress, provided it was sufficiently statist. Nancy Pelosi’s statement that we’d have to find out the contents of the bill after they passed it is probably better-understood in this context.

Obama’s big idea mindset also explains why he has no compunction about spending so much time on the golf course or on vacation and why he couldn’t be bothered to attend many national security briefings. He’s the big issue guy; let lesser mortals haggle over the “details.”

But here’s what’s scary. Because of Obama’s blind leftist ideology and his quasi-religious zeal in pursuing them, he’s impervious to negative feedback, negative consequences and negative results. He looks at his stimulus bill, which didn’t stimulate anything except more unemployment and higher debt, and believes — or claims he believes — that it worked. His economic ideas haven’t changed at all. He intends to double down on his stimulus spending in a second term.

The debt, to him, is a nuisance, an aggravation and an inconvenient obstacle to his goal of fundamentally transforming America through radical schemes of redistribution via both taxation and spending. This is one of the main reasons he has blocked entitlement reform to date and would continue to do so if re-elected.

He either doesn’t care about the national debt and the future financial health of this country or is in denial about the crushing effects his deficit spending would have in a second term. Either way, he intends to stay the course — the course that heads straight for the cliff, toward national bankruptcy.

Obama’s statement shows that he has learned nothing constructive from the past four years. His first-term takeaway is that he will have to be even more determined and ruthless in a second term in driving through his agenda, which he now understands can only be achieved through Alinsky tactics. So when he says change must be achieved from the outside, that is code for “community organizing” and means he’d be even less respectful of the Constitution and rule of law in a second term — which is chilling.

David Limbaugh is a writer, author and attorney. His latest book, “The Great Destroyer,” reached No. 2 on the New York Times best-seller list for nonfiction. Follow him on Twitter @davidlimbaugh and his website at: www.davidlimbaugh.com.